selfhoster1312

> This doesn’t require a huge data center or anything, it’s basic computer vision and a small on-vehicle model.

Yes, but it still has a strong ecological impact, and for what benefit? I only ever hear people complaining about electronics/assist in cars, and recalls due to electronic faults is about 50% of car recalls nowadays.

The problem is not that this compute is overall so much compute, it's that it's used to replace "no compute", and that in the ecological lifecycle of electronics production is the biggest problem (not sustained use). A modern car has hundreds of microcontrollers and probably as many sensors… Although some of these features are technically not machine learning, i think it's part of the same problem.

I wish we could have better/safer/cheaper cars over time, that can be more easily maintained. Instead we have shitter and more expensive cars that are less rapairable than ever before.

> They can accept cash and crypto donations

Sure, but what about users not receiving email? I mean some operators like Riseup could hardcode autistici.org to a new domain to resolve, but not every email operator is going to do this. Or is my understanding that they provide @autistici.org mailboxes wrong?

There's plenty of arguments to be had. I guess there could be some useful applications of non-LLM AI (eg. translation tools), but quality output is still a concern. Environmental impact is also still a concern. If output is of sufficient quality, who reaps the benefits is a concern ; if not, who pays the price of shittier products is a concern.

Whether LLM or non-LLM tech, the question of surveillance capitalism and how models need to be fed swaths of privacy-invading data (eg. self-driving cars filming everything all the time) is also a concern.

Overall, i think the ecological concern is still the biggest one. We are at the start of a major climate crisis, and any self-preserving measures were already hard fought by industry. I fear that any form of AI investment will lead (because it's already leading) to destroying any hope of saving an inhabitable planet.

From anything i read/watched of him, the shorthand is "it doesn't work". When taking more than a few words to explain, it means it's not replacing humans altogether, because the output is low-quality and needs human quality control. In the end, he's not arguing LLMs are not working (as in returning 500 in your browser), but that the promise of autonomous agents replacing humans for increased productivity is a lie and doesn't work.

I overall agree with his interpretation, but i'm afraid he might be wrong in the conclusion that noone is going to replace human labor with shittier agent slop. As long as we humans don't really have regulations and choice for proper quality of service, companies might just in fact enshittify everything with slop and make more profits while we suffer from lower-quality products and support.

As someone who's strongly anti-AI, i find Zitron to be absolutely too much pro-AI for my taste. He defends AI that's not LLMs. He barely touches on ecological impacts of AI, and barely mentions the enshittification of things. He's only really against the LLM craze, OpenAI/Anthropic over-evaluation (because Deepseek and local models will do the same for nearly free), and the crazy speculative bubble around datacenters.

If you find him very negative about AI, and i find him very positive about AI, he might just be this reasonable centrist.

Well they had their chance for "change" with Obama, just like the french PS had their chance for "changement" with Hollande. And both betrayed their electoral base and honest people by empowering multinational corporations against consumers and small businesses. Who could have predicted that noone would want to elect them again?

To my knowledge you can only go to the EHCR once you have depleted all your national legal options, which can take about a decade here in Europe. Given that the Italian government is now run by actual neofascists, who also control most of european institutions (hand in hand with the classic "liberals"), i don't think a small non-profit anarchist host has much chance to win in court.

Even if they do win in court, it will be far too late for their thousands of @autistici.org emails. And even with a court victory, there's no guarantee technical intermediaries may ignore US sanctions (despite what EU ruling says). The only real solution is to get rid of US hegemony over the DNS, the banking system, the global military balance, etc.

Do we even have a real choice with our governments? As a minor yet dramatic exemple, last year in France the Front Populaire won the last parliamentary elections, and according to republican tradition and common interpretation of the constitution, should have formed a government. But that was refused by Macron who named yet again an even more impopular proto-fascist government because it's technically in his power.

I hate to make this argument because the PRC is far from a political ideal for me, but the chinese political system also has elections and votes. Voting is not what democracy is about, and very indirect elections for a vast body with immense powers even less so.

I have yet to meet anyone happy with the european commission policies, except for very minor and timid arrangements such as the USB-C connector (and even then, Apple fanboys complained). The rest is all about destroying every pro-consumer/pro-worker/pro-environment regulation in favor of big multinationals who employs thousands of lobbyists across Brussels and Strasbourg.

The technique is simple: don't publicly serve expensive (CPU/RAM-wise) pages. A simple blog like the linked article can be 100% cached and served to anyone without needing CloudFlare.

Performance optimization for website already is a business. It's just that product managers mostly don't care and optimize for other metrics (eyeball retention, SEO, etc).

If we're actually talking about a hack, there's no particular reason to believe it was done by an APT who would like to retain access.

Maybe a kid just wanted to do it for fun? Maybe a smaller hacking group who would just like to make a statement against fascist/imperialist USA is happy to just cost them a few million dollars with a few network packets?

> Biggest mistake most librefication projects make is to do their project out in the open

That's not it. Most youtube downloaders are not developed in the open and Youtube still breaks them every other week by changing on purpose the way they operate. And, unlike highly obfuscated instructions, studying the network queries used by a simple app does not require expensive reverse engineering efforts from Spotify engineers; essentially, it's the same as developing in the open.

The only case i can think where obfuscation might help would be if the actual Spotify API consumers were servers by the app developers (or some form of obfuscation via residential proxies) and the app developed an entirely different API to/from its servers. But then, you're back to the developers and hosts can receive legal threats, etc...

> the lawyers are more expensive than just ignoring these pet projects

The lawyers are more expensive than happy customers staying customers because they can enjoy the client they prefer, that's for sure.

> There's a lot of IKEA furniture on the second hand market.

Anecdata: about half of secondhand IKEA-like furniture i get my hands on is somewhat severely damaged, and about a quarter overall i just throw away. Stats may be different elsewhere, but even talking to other local skippers and ressourcerie workers here in France, the common knowledge is that unless you get it in perfect mint condition, there's no point or resale value in chipboard/plywood furniture.

(this is not just a furniture problem, about 90% of electronics entering a ressourcerie will just end up in the recycling bin because repairing it takes skills, time and resources for very little commercial resale value)

> If this genuinely is a worry of yours then I'd be more worried about what to eat

Good point, i'm not claiming simply stopping to buy IKEA-like products is going to save the planet. There's much much more to do.

> The problem isn't that we have too few trees

I agree overall, although it's often locally wrong: industrial agriculture is displacing a lot of forests and woods which negatively affects the water cycle (a different issue). Here in France deforestation is a real problem and simply keeping concentrated patches of mono-species woods (that you blank cut every X years) isn't helping nature thrive.

> Of course, if one has romantic notions of solid wood furniture then one would most likely sneer at products made from recycled wood

I have conflicting feelings about it. I'm of course very much pro-recycling as a concept. However the current implementation of taking chemical-filled products and chemical-bathing them to produce more chemical-filled products (eg. plastics or chipboard) doesn't exactly sound eco-friendly.

In fact, i'm not even romantic about massive wood furniture. I've more than once almost broke my back on them in staircases, and the price new is crazy. I'd say half of my furniture is massive and half is Ikea/Conforama: 0% has been bought from the original store, 50% has been bought secondhand (the rest found/donated) and no single item cost more than 20€. I don't have bad feelings for my Ikea-style furniture (love my 2 Ikea GNEDBY for the books), i just don't think this industrial production and throwaway-furniture culture is something we should aim for as a society because it's not sustainable.

> People don't get rid of it because it gets worn out.

That's true, but once you move it around and/or disassemble it it gets very easily damaged, which prevents second-hand use.

> Why would I want to buy furniture that lasts centuries?

Well it's not all just a matter of personal taste. The ecological lifecycle of massive wood kept over generation is much better than throwaway furniture. Very egoistically, you may want to live in a society that values preserving an inhabitable planet. Alternatively, you may appreciate that some people do and that being stuck with the same furniture (among other arrangements) is a small price to pay.

You are correct, I used Ikea as a generic name for cheap plywood stuff. But there was still strong furniture being built in that era, it didn't all stop in the 1930s, if anything, because a portion of the population even in the global north had not converted to a "modern" post-WWII lifestyle as we see in the movies.

We can and should ban technologies whose cons outweigh the pros. For example, in the past century, we successfully banned leaded pipes and paints, uranium glass, asbestos, CFC refrigerants (etc).

Most of those struggles had intense lobbying from the industry with more or less the same discourse you have. I don't care if AI can do my bidding if it destroys the planet and the livelihood of my loved ones with it, just like i don't care if lead pipes can bring water to my home if they bring saturnism to my entire community.

I don't think it's just a question of uniqueness. There's still distinct cultures across the planet, which affects architecture, furniture, kitchen equipment (and many other things).

Some people might reasonably expect when traveling thousands of km to find different kitchen styles/utensils/recipes. Not everyone wants to be assimilated in a global tasteless culture. (see also, memes about how late-stage capitalism made everything bland and colorless, from cars to electronics)

Yes, the problem is durability before Ikea was counted in centuries. Sure, this or that furniture may need to refit the hinges or refill the cushions every few decades, but your local handyman/handywoman would do it for cheap and the furniture would be well for some more decades.

That, and apart from the tiny unfortunate period during which everything had to be leaded or mixed with uranium, your traditional furniture will degrade gracefully over time and not poison your entire family. Ikea-like (not just Ikea) furniture is already full of toxic chemicals.

> Do you think AGPL is going to stop a crawler from incorporating your work into their training set?

No, but i propose we ostracize anyone who uses LLMs for the wrong reasons (i.e. not accessibility), and i hope you do too. The reasons are mostly not related to licenses, though, but it upholds licensing as a nice-to-have consequence.

(loved your comment edit)

Nitpicking here, but nazi repression was not only against jewish people. Also against other claimed inferior races (eg. tsigans), but also handicapped people, homosexuals... and very relevant to this thread, communists and anarchists.

Ha yes of course, this is obvious to anyone in the field but always a good idea to repeat. For example, do not use human feces as fertilizer for food you'll eat (at least not directly).

I agree it's still a problem, but closing obviously-LLM PRs and banning the "contributors" would help i guess. What would help even more is hosting your project on a network where that's bad etiquette, eg. Codeberg.

That sounds like hypophantasia, i.e. not the absence of internal imagery, but a very vague one.

Using manure and compost as fertilizer is likely as old as agriculture (though i disagree using pesticides is fine). What did you mean?

> That's a super weird way of putting it, which makes me hesitate to agree with you.

Yes that's weird sorry. What i meant is it belongs in the uncanny valley. I don't have any good/bad feelings about test suites and CI feedback, it's very binary. Receiving a mail about a comment on my PR raises my hopes that it reached the maintainers (or interest from other contributors); receiving LLM text destroys my expectations.

Then, about the content itself, it has a very patronizing tone. Saying out loud every single thing that's in my +25/-3 PR is really infantilizing. I would probably have slightly less negative reactions if it only commented to suggest improvements, instead of patting me on the back. See this example: https://github.com/TwiN/gatus/pull/1712#pullrequestreview-46...

So i'm critical of LLMs even if you consent to their use (for ecological/political/cognitive reasons). But in that case at least it's your tool and your expectations. I'm not even sure the maintainers had a say in the random LLM interactions i had on their projects, but i certainly didn't consent.

If the maintainer wants a LLM to review my PRs, let the maintainer use a LLM. Don't make me deal with abrasive chatbots when you want to deal with abrasive chatbots. I don't want an LLM to pre-screen my work to decide if a human should review it; a human should decide if my contribution is worth it. Otherwise, that project is not worthy of my modest contribution.

> It is a shame that Google's leadership is so spineless.

This is wrong, just like the article you linked. Google has been a proud member of the military industrial complex for many years.

Alex Turner is naive when he thinks big psychopath corporation may have internal regulations to protect us from big psychopath government. He's somewhat deluded when he thinks this is a new problem and he personally has power against this. The only way we workers can enforce some level of ethics is via powerful unions (with strikes/sabotage), not as lonely individual "threatening" to leave the company.

I'm sorry he had to learn this the hard way. There's still plenty of time for you to realize that no or few company will grow a spine, because that's not what companies do, what they are for, or what they're directed to do (except maybe a small mom and pop shop).

Because letting sloperators near your codebase, even for a very minor obvious and correct change, may have long-term negative consequences for your project. It sends a signal to other sloperators to keep doing what they do, when we really need to send them a signal to get a life, learn a craft, and let Claude burn in hell.

> Because of machines, things have arguably improved for humanity as a whole.

That's a very narrow view of the situation. I agree that this side of the coin exists, but there's also the other side where drinkable tap water is becoming a luxury in much of the global North, giant tornadoes and fires are sweeping the Earth, and temperatures are growing out of control.

So, to make lives more comfortable with machines for some millions of privileged people, they triggered the 6th mass extinction. That's the other side of the coin.